Steam vs MAME

[MSZ]

Mushi works fine for me Banana. For the sake of newbs, can you specify why it's shit? Because it's not accurate to arcade slowdown?

if 5pb wasn't the one porting futari it would probably be the default and only option
sdoj is a special case as it's even worse somehow

M2 was the one who ported Futari. 5pb did DOJBL and Ketsui. 5pb didn't actually do anything in those two ports though, as they stole the codes from Arika for the DOJ port and Arika and CAVE did most of the works for the Ketsui port after all the DOJ lawsuit cases were settled.

[Bananamatic]

yeah, I got the two mixed up lol

[BIL]

M2 was the one who ported Futari. 5pb did DOJBL and Ketsui. 5pb didn't actually do anything in those two ports though, as they stole the codes from Akira for the DOJ port and Akira and CAVE did most of the works for the Ketsui port after all the DOJ lawsuit cases were settled.

*Arika ;3

[MSZ]

M2 was the one who ported Futari. 5pb did DOJBL and Ketsui. 5pb didn't actually do anything in those two ports though, as they stole the codes from Akira for the DOJ port and Akira and CAVE did most of the works for the Ketsui port after all the DOJ lawsuit cases were settled.

*Arika ;3

Fixed, thanks.

[Despatche]

Raiden Legacy is really bad. You're much better off playing the first Raiden in MAME, where you can also play II and DX. For the Raiden Fighters games, you're better off tracking down Raiden Fighters Aces for the 360. If you don't have a 360, you might want to stick to MAME for those games too then.

What you're asking is the legitimacy of "paying for ROMs". Playing copyrighted games without owning them is, quite simply, illegal, so being able to buy a copy through an official channel is always best. But when that official channel is hot garbage that somehow does a worse effort than playing it illegally, such as with Raiden Legacy, please do not give that official channel your money. Stuff like Nintendo's Virtual Console, and the Arcade Archives series on PS4, are generally pretty good and you should definitely throw money at them.

There's nothing really great like that on Steam or GOG. Most of the good Steam or GOG ports are of older PC or console exclusives, not anything you could play in MAME. All the MAME stuff on Steam is either DotEmu's garbage, or one of CAVE's ports which have tons of extra features making them worth purchasing.

I wonder if they ever fixed the speed issue in Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting.

You mean this? Sure doesn't look like it.

Mushi works fine for me Banana. For the sake of newbs, can you specify why it's shit? Because it's not accurate to arcade slowdown?

if 5pb wasn't the one porting futari it would probably be the default and only option
sdoj is a special case as it's even worse somehow

M2 was the one who ported Futari. 5pb did DOJBL and Ketsui. 5pb didn't actually do anything in those two ports though, as they stole the codes from Arika for the DOJ port and Arika and CAVE did most of the works for the Ketsui port after all the DOJ lawsuit cases were settled.

Not entirely accurate. All accounts suggest that only the DOJ portion was stolen, and the narrative for that is that the developers obtained the rights to the DOJ portion from a source code holding company Arika had been using. The BL and X portions were all new code, and they seem to have ran okay even before the patches.

[electricgrave]

I love both Steam and MAME. I use both frequently, as far as mushi goes I couldn't tell you 'cause I haven't played both formats. I have however played Deathsmiles on PCB, 360, Steam & MAME and I prefer them in that order. My setup is either not strong enough to run MAME at full speed on the newer games or it's just not up to par yet. The difference of slowdowns on different platforms doesn't bother me as much but I can definitely tell 'cause as you know, the Lv. 3 Inferno is great for milking and you kinda work the slowdown a lot in that one, well at least on the PCB...however the Steam port isn't bad, I was able to milk it pretty good, same for the 360, but I always do way better on the PCB.

[tzakiel]

I love both Steam and MAME. I use both frequently, as far as mushi goes I couldn't tell you 'cause I haven't played both formats. I have however played Deathsmiles on PCB, 360, Steam & MAME and I prefer them in that order. My setup is either not strong enough to run MAME at full speed on the newer games or it's just not up to par yet. The difference of slowdowns on different platforms doesn't bother me as much but I can definitely tell 'cause as you know, the Lv. 3 Inferno is great for milking and you kinda work the slowdown a lot in that one, well at least on the PCB...however the Steam port isn't bad, I was able to milk it pretty good, same for the 360, but I always do way better on the PCB.

Sorry to bring up an old thread here but I had a question for you. When you tried deathsmiles in MAME, did you enable the blitter setting to on, and adjust the slider to 66%? That is sort of necessary to enable the kind of slowdown you are talking about. It's still not "accurate" but it has the same effect.

[clippa]

mame is great in that you can set up your default controls and graphical settings and you're good to go for every game.
Steam is great in that you're supporting the developers and you get an official leaderboard.
So long as the port isn't terrible, I'm more than happy to buy a game I've already played to death.

[el_rika]

I wonder if they ever fixed the speed issue in Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting.

I play it regulary in Final Burn Alpha and the speed in just right. Is the Mame emulation way too fast?

On another note, is the PCB slowdown in, let's say Dodonpachi (or any other cave shmup), due to momentarily hardware overload, or is it artificially put there by the devs..? Same question for Hadouken impact in SF2 games (no guard), where the game always slows to half speed for 2 seconds.

[Despatche]

Concerning CAVE's games, it's technically both. The vast majority of their games are designed "against" the hardware. The hardware is hilariously underpowered, and CAVE knows full and well that the game is slowing down when they do this and that, so they design patterns so that it sorta seems okay in the end. It's not okay, at all. It's godawful design, and the only reason people tolerate it is because they've allowed themselves to get used to it.

People can tolerate all sorts of terrible things in a work if their first impression of that work can convince them to. For example, there are people who legitimately believe that the Dragon Ball Z standard of stretching out single actions and fights for multiple minutes or even entire episodes is well-designed pacing, all because this is what they became used to as kids. These people exist. They are out there. They legitimately believe that any other DB series, the manga, and possibly most anime are lesser because they "move too fast". The same goes for CAVE games. People have convinced themselves that the very idea of slowdown-based design is inherently good simply because their favorite games happen to have such a crippling design flaw.

This is not to say that such slowdown should not be preserved in ports of a given game, because accuracy is very important. This is also not to say that Espgaluda is a bad game, because it uses a very different (and actually well thought out) concept; "slowdown" might as well be a completely different word in that game.

[WelshMegalodon]

I play it regulary in Final Burn Alpha and the speed in just right. Is the Mame emulation way too fast?

As stated before, yes, CPS2 emulation is too fast in MAME. Probably not noticeable to the casual player, but it's off enough that EVO won't use it for tournaments.

Emulators advertising performance are rarely as accurate as their slower counterparts, so I've never trusted Final Burn Alpha. (Here's to hoping BlastEm will challenge that stereotype in the years to come.)

People can tolerate all sorts of terrible things in a work if their first impression of that work can convince them to. For example, there are people who legitimately believe that the Dragon Ball Z standard of stretching out single actions and fights for multiple minutes or even entire episodes is well-designed pacing, all because this is what they became used to as kids. These people exist. They are out there. They legitimately believe that any other DB series, the manga, and possibly most anime are lesser because they "move too fast". The same goes for CAVE games. People have convinced themselves that the very idea of slowdown-based design is inherently good simply because their favorite games happen to have such a crippling design flaw.

They ought to sit down and have a chat with with the "decompression" weirdos in comic book circles. What better way to avoid exerting effort in criticizing a work than judging it purely by its pacing?

[Despatche]

I fucking wish DBZ's padding had even 10% of the merit of decompression. DBZ already has extensive decompression, as many Japanese works do. The way DBZ does things is nothing more than padding out for a hilarious amount of time.

Sweet, a new MD emulator. We've really needed one, all we've had for years is Fusion, a questionable port of Genesis Plus GX, the potentially questionable Exodus, and poor old Gens/GS II. It even has this brilliant experimental UI instead of some spartan piece of shit like every nerd with some C++ knowledge wants these days. Fuck, the current state of emulation is so much more cynical and desolate than the hopeful but rough years of the early '00s. I'm not even nostalgic for that shit either, it's just plain better than the soulless atmosphere we have now.

[Shepardus]

mame is great in that you can set up your default controls and graphical settings and you're good to go for every game.
Steam is great in that you're supporting the developers and you get an official leaderboard.
So long as the port isn't terrible, I'm more than happy to buy a game I've already played to death.

One thing I like a lot about MAME is that it actually lets me choose which monitor to play on, which allows me to play on my second, vertically-oriented monitor while many PC games don't recognize it and only let me select resolutions based on the first monitor.

[OmegaFlareX]

Concerning CAVE's games, it's technically both. The vast majority of their games are designed "against" the hardware. The hardware is hilariously underpowered, and CAVE knows full and well that the game is slowing down when they do this and that, so they design patterns so that it sorta seems okay in the end. It's not okay, at all. It's godawful design, and the only reason people tolerate it is because they've allowed themselves to get used to it.

This times a jigawatt. Then these same people insist on having it in the home ports as well. Well, I guess it's fine for the straight-up arcade modes, but I'd much prefer if they remove all slowdown from port-specific modes and instead adjust the speed of some of the patterns. This is the only problem I have with CAVE - otherwise their games are superbly designed and great fun to play.

[Bananamatic]

you do realize that adjusting just the speed of the patterns means that your ship moves at the same speed and the enemy hp depletes at the same speed too
you'd have to remake everything according to it or you'd end up with a broken mess where everything dies before it barely shoots anything while you can run around the slow patterns without issues

[OmegaFlareX]

you'd have to remake everything according to it

Yes, this is what I want. I'd rather have a design pass done on the game than those dev resources spent on imitating the AC speed. Is that unreasonable?

[WelshMegalodon]

Sweet, a new MD emulator. We've really needed one, all we've had for years is Fusion, a questionable port of Genesis Plus GX, the potentially questionable Exodus, and poor old Gens/GS II. It even has this brilliant experimental UI instead of some spartan piece of shit like every nerd with some C++ knowledge wants these days. Fuck, the current state of emulation is so much more cynical and desolate than the hopeful but rough years of the early '00s. I'm not even nostalgic for that shit either, it's just plain better than the soulless atmosphere we have now.

Genesis Plus GX via Bizhawk is actually quite usable, and farther along than the incomplete Windows port. Unless you're talking about RetroArch, in which case I should add that the libretro port isn't as good at handling resolutions as the original. (libretro ports seem to have a habit of mucking about with such things; see this for another example.)

The emulation scene is still pretty exciting these days if you ask me. Mesen just might hit 100% compatibility and dethrone the half dozen or so other NES emulators competing for second place. PS1 emulation isn't plugin hell anymore, thanks to Mednafen, and CEN64 will fix N64 emulation... eventually. PCem also looks to point toward a brighter future for emulation of DOS- and Windows-based systems, Dolphin is getting better all the time, and redream looks extremely promising. What's more, there are still major hurdles to be cleared, like, say... CPS3 emulation that doesn't suck, though I don't see that happening any time soon. Same goes for ST-V and Model 3 emulation.